Project Plan

Work on New Goals

Work on new goals—that’s task number two in my Task Summary (see December’s post). I figured that should be straight-forward task. Yet writing the daily, weekly, monthly, and annual goals, stumped me. I wrote elaborate goals that seemed impossible to achieve. I wanted manageable goals. What does that term really mean? So first, let’s define terms.

Note: The original post about project cost estimates is here. Shout out and thank you to Lizzie Davey for hosting Wanderful World!

How do you estimate the time and cost for a project?

Projects have many variables.

Lizzie Davey asked a similar question in her weekly email. “…[H]ow are we supposed to know how long it’s going to take us to read through a 35-page document and edit it? It all depends on the language, how much of it is images, and how deep an edit the client wants, right?”

Right!

Highlights

The prospective client came through a personal referral. I based my timeframe and price were based on prior experience, and I dug into the work. Part way through, I discovered that the content development took longer than my original estimate to the client.

The Project Scene

You have some information for the new documentation project. Your managers can write, but they’re involved in deployment and sales. So they don’t have much time to work on this new content. The responsibility rests with you. Where do you start?

Or, you have your policies and procedures. And the government agency you follow published new regulations. The agency gave everyone 10 months to update their documents. Your managers have customer-facing projects; they don’t have time to update P&P. Where do you start?

With a needs analysis!

Ask Yourself These Questions

1. What stage is your documentation/content in now?

Think about the applications the content is in. Word? PDF? A help authoring tool? Jumbled notes?

5. What is the final content and what format will you use?

6. What is your time frame?

7. And the money question: What is your budget?

Create a Successful Documentation Project

You want a successful documentation project. Define the stage of your content now, before you start. Be clear about your goal. Set those parameters in the Planning or Initiation Phase (see PMI). And conduct a needs analysis!